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Now Hiring Robots

Google and others claim that any technology that frees humans from doing repetitive manual labor is a positive thing. In an idealistic way, I agree, but realistically, it seems like the market is eliminating many more jobs than it is creating. Oxford researchers suggest that 47% of total U.S. employment is at risk due to computerization. This cartoon was mostly about robots in the future, but as Paul Krugman pointed out, computerization is already hollowing out middle-class and highly skilled jobs, from legal research to chip design, and is reducing labor’s influence in the market. How far off is an editorial cartooning robot that can simplistically label stock images to provide thoughtless commentary? Cartoons like this and this suggest it’s not very far.

2 thoughts on “Now Hiring Robots”

I am also very concerned. We need unions to protect the middle class. Now that they have weakened, the average American is not benefiting from the technology boom. Jobs are going elsewhere. We also need to reduce the number of immigrants. (this has nothing to do with racism. It is common sense, wages are being lowered from the competition. Also we have enough poor people now, and we are not even taking care of them.